Chapter 17
... four grains of arsenic, two of alum, and three peppercorns. Grind and mix with water gathered in an old shoe. The resultant paste should be applied to the affected area.
For grief the only true cure is patience. For patience there is no cure.
Assured Remedies , by Tabetha Hawthorn
CHAPTER 17
Evar
When not tending to Kerrol, who proved to be a very needy patient, Evar patrolled the perimeter, or at least where he judged it to be. He wasn’t able to speak to the humans, though he did want to learn their language, and he didn’t enjoy the way his presence seemed to unsettle them no matter how non-threatening he tried to be.
On perhaps his seventh circuit of the day, Evar heard what sounded like rockfall, the source of the noise hidden by the plateau’s edge. He’d heard the odd stone rattle down from time to time, eased out of broken cliffs by the wind’s persistence. But this sounded like something more substantial.
First, Evar made a thorough study of the skies. Clovis was still below ground with Arpix but he didn’t need her present to hear her lecture him in his mind about the dangers from above. When he was convinced there were no fliers ready to swoop, Evar advanced quietly towards the meandering line where the flat ground fell away.
Poised to dash back towards the sanctuary, Evar peered over. The cliffs, formerly shaded in browns and rust, were clothed in white. More than a hundred skeer warriors were labouring to roll half a dozen or more big whitish-grey balls up the slopes and making hard work of it. They must have advanced to the plateau’s base under cover of night.
A runner, secreted near the top, lunged at Evar and he fell back with a bark of surprise. His scrabbling feet found purchase before the monster dragged itself over the brink on long, sharp legs. Evar shot back to safer ground and turned just in time to see the runner bounce off the invisible wall and collapse into its own dust cloud in an untidy mess.
“Skeer! Skeer!” Evar sprinted back to the others.
“They can’t get in, surely?” Kerrol, lying flat on his back, levered himself up to his elbows.
“Well, since they know that better than we do, let’s assume they didn’t come so far in such numbers just so we can laugh at them. They’re bringing something with them.” Evar grabbed hold of one of the confused human males and pointed him at the plateau’s edge. “Skeer.” He said it in their tongue.
“Get Clovis!” Kerrol said, but Evar was already on his way to the tunnels.
—
Clovis answered his shouts almost immediately, emerging from the darkness covered in dust.
“Skeer! Over a hundred warriors, and they’ve brought something with them.”
“Show me.” Clovis hurried past him.
“Arpix?” For a moment Evar worried that Clovis had left him dead in the tunnels.
“He won’t make a difference,” Clovis said. “Let him howl.”
Evar followed her with a frown. “Howl?”
But any answer was lost when the dozen or so skeer that had reached the top began to manoeuvre the first of the large spheres up onto level ground. The thing looked rather like a wind-weed ball but with far fewer gaps. It was woven from some sort of vitreous exudate of similar consistency to the skeer’s own armour plates.
The ball jerked from side to side and it soon became apparent that it was less the weight of it that required so many skeer to propel it, and more the violent motion of whatever was trapped inside.
An awful scream rent the day, an inhuman cry, shuddering with rage. It seemed that whatever was in the ball had been unconscious for some while and was now waking. Another, weaker, scream rang out from somewhere down the cliffs. If these unknown captives had been awake the whole time then a stealthy approach would have been impossible.
Evar and the others watched as scores of skeer warriors slowly dragged seven of the spheres onto the plateau, lining them up close to the barrier that defied them.
Arpix, breathless and red-faced, came running up from the tunnels as the last sphere was rolled forward. All the humans were talking at once. Arpix pushed through them to stand between Clovis and Evar. “Those are the screams of cratalacs. Very dangerous creatures, I’ve heard, though I’ve never seen one. They hunt only at night.”
“I think you’re about to see seven of them.” Evar could see motion in all the spheres now, and the first to arrive was starting to crack in several places as the prisoner raged inside. All the skeer were drawing back, dozens already gone from sight as they retreated down the cliffs.
“The skeer must know your wall won’t stop them.” Clovis turned to look at Arpix. “We have brought a war to your doorstep.” She drew her sword, the blade brilliant in the sunlight. “This is my fight, not yours.”
Arpix reached for her, showing a familiarity that astonished Evar. “Livira always said you can’t win a fight with a cratalac. We should retreat to the tunnels.”
Clovis shook him off without reprimand. “Here I get to face one while the rest are trapped. It may still be sedated.”
“It doesn’t sound sedated.” Kerrol was on his feet, rolling his shoulder and wincing.
“At least wait to see if it can get through the wall,” Arpix growled.
Grudgingly, Clovis halted before the line traced out with widely spaced marker stones. She stretched her neck from side to side with audible popping sounds. A claw like a black scythe broke from the first sphere, showering the ground with pieces of the container. A horrified shriek and several gasps went up from the humans. Arpix shouted orders at them.
The sphere fell apart, leaving the cratalac standing amid the remnants of its shell, shaking loose pieces off its carapace.
“Now that’s ugly,” Clovis muttered.
The cratalac shared more in common with the skeer than with humans or canith, but where the skeer were white this thing was black shot through with a grey so close to that of the dust it seemed almost invisible in these places, as if it were a collection of black fragments in motion. Moreover, where the skeer had clean lines and simplicity, this beast was a nightmare of hooks and bristling hair and clawed limbs and jaws framing dripping mouthparts. It loosed another spine-shaking scream as two more of the spheres started to break.
Rather than focus its attention on the skeer who had captured it and rolled it unknown miles to a strange location, the cratalac aimed its fury at Clovis and those behind her. Those behind her currently being Evar and Arpix, as the others were retreating towards the tunnels, taking Kerrol with them.
Evar thought Arpix should go with them. In fact, looking at the cratalac, he was pretty sure he should go too. Not only was the thing larger than a skeer, it also evoked some primal horror in him that the skeer did not. It put him more in mind of a spider: its too-many legs and the alien way in which it moved them made his skin crawl. It reminded him strongly of several Escapes he’d encountered before but was somehow more loathsome in a deep, visceral way that sidestepped his intellect.
Clovis didn’t share Evar’s hesitation. As the cratalac scuttled forward, passing through the city’s protection without hesitation, she charged to meet it. The creature moved with unnerving speed. Clovis threw herself into its clutches in a way that, whilst it must be calculated to increase her chances, was something Evar knew he would never be able to do. He would have danced at the margins of its reach, seeking to wear the thing down.
The savagery of what followed was unexpected even after seeing the thing fight its way out of the sphere. Clovis’s white sword flashed; she turned and twisted amid a forest of limbs; black body parts flew in various directions, trailing arcs of ichor.
Evar found himself advancing despite his fear, but the suddenness of the instant in which Clovis was caught shocked him into a stumble. The cratalac raised her from the ground, pinned by the two curving horns of its jaws. Dripping mouthparts punched out and fastened on her chest, eliciting a cry of pain. Evar sprang forward, slashing with his knife at the nearest of the insectoid’s limbs. For a few frantic moments the cratalac shook Clovis like a dog with a rabbit, the horror of it cut short by a flash of white that left her sailing through the air with rag doll limbs. Half her armour stayed behind, hanging from the creature’s remaining jaw-horn, the iron plates torn away or twisted.
“Clo!” Evar shot back, trying to reach her without exposing his spine to the enemy. The cratalac didn’t give chase, but instead, thrashing and hissing, it stomped a half-circle with foreshortened limbs. Two of the other spheres were now in pieces, their occupants screaming at the sky, and the last four were breaking. “Clovis!” Evar scooped up her sword before reaching her.
“Uh...” Clovis struggled to her knees. An ugly wound ran from her shoulder across her chest, blood pulsing bright crimson from torn flesh.
“C’mon!” Evar hauled her up, even as she reclaimed her blade, half carrying her towards the tunnels. In moments the cratalacs would shake off the last of their cages and sedation. In fact, the tattoo of footfalls behind them suggested at least one had already fixed its multiple eyes on their retreating forms.
Among all this, Evar realised with shock that he’d just passed Arpix, the frail human standing his ground though he seemed more bookish than even Kerrol and wasn’t carrying so much as a sharpened stick to defend himself with. Evar slowed, his stride shortened both by the realisation they weren’t going to outrun the cratalac that had given chase, and by the thought of what Livira would say if he abandoned her friend.
He tugged Clovis’s sword from her hand and turned with her. She would want to face her death head on, the same way she’d faced her life. Arpix stood a few yards closer to the advancing cratalac, one of the fresh ones, his arm raised to throw a rock at it. Evar roared at him to get back, but the human ignored him, instead throwing his missile. It missed the cratalac’s head and impacted what might be loosely described as the shoulder. It should have been impossible to miss at that range but fear does unwelcome things to your muscles. In any event, hitting the cratalac square in the head with a rock five times the size and thrown three times as hard would probably have had little effect from what Evar had seen.
The beast came on without pause, a broken moment away from scooping Arpix up and shredding him. Arpix turned to run but he had no chance of escape. Amazingly, just before it reached him, the cratalac collapsed drunkenly, screeching worse than ever. The armour in a wide area around where Arpix had hit it was falling away, the flesh beneath smoking.
Arpix reached Evar and slung Clovis’s other arm over his shoulders, taking some of her weight. A third cratalac was skirting the convulsions of the second, angling towards them but still shaking off its own sedation.
“Can you do that again?” Evar asked.
“No.”
“Get her to the tunnels.” Evar shrugged off Clovis’s arm and readied himself in the cratalacs’ path, white sword angled across his body.
More cratalacs freed themselves, two tearing apart the one that Clovis had maimed. Others approached Arpix’s victim then backed off as if alarmed by its condition or the sharp, metallic stink rising from it.
Evar retreated slowly, giving Arpix and Clovis the time they needed.
At last, after what seemed an age, a shout came from behind him. Finding himself unexpectedly alive, Evar backed off rapidly, and when two cratalacs sighted him and began to charge, he ran like hell.
Evar reached the nearest tunnel mouth with his pursuers growing loud behind him, their scrabbling run accelerating in that final phase in which prey becomes food. He dived through the narrow gap in a hastily erected barrier of ancient timbers, dead thorn bushes, and rusting railings.
The whole lot exploded behind him as the first cratalac burst through. Ahead of him he could see flickers of flame and the motion of bodies, multiple humans and two canith retreating.
“Run!” They should have been deep in the mines by now, not wasting time on barricades. “Run!”
The first cratalac filled the tunnel, its cries of fury deafening as it struggled to advance in the narrow confines while battling with the debris snared among its limbs. Evar opened a gap on it as he caught up with Arpix and Clovis.
“It gets... small,” Clovis managed.
“They won’t fit in further on,” Arpix said, sharing with Evar the task of moving Clovis. “We need to get deeper.”
They pushed on through an underground system Evar hadn’t yet visited. Already he had to bend low and the sides were starting to close in. The human’s torches were bundles of dry leaves and produced more smoke than light. With little visibility, little room, and the terrifying cratalac screams echoing around, Evar felt his grasp on the situation slipping. Panic began to fill him—panic at being trapped with cratalacs in the dark, panic at the state Clovis was in.
The attack came from an unexpected angle. A cratalac must have taken one of the half-dozen other entrances and flanked their retreat. Only the fact that it could barely squeeze through prevented a slaughter on top of the blind, rushing, screaming rout that followed. Evar jumped the thrust of a barbed limb, barely seen in the gloom as its owner lunged from a side passage. He dragged his sister with a roar of effort, careless of her wounds, only determined that she not end in the insectoid’s filthy maw. After that it was all running and confusion.
—
“Kerrol?”
“I’m here.”
They were in a tunnel whose roof came so low Evar had been forced to crawl. The place hadn’t been dug out by humans. “Clovis?” He had her in his arms.
“...present...” A cough followed the weak response.
All the torches were out, though their smoke still stung his eyes. He could see nothing at all.
“Arpix?” He could hear Arpix calling the humans’ names.
“I’m checking.” Arpix carried on. “Henral?”
A human replied.
“Salamonda?”
Silence.
“Salamonda?” A pause before several humans started to talk at once.
Evar knew the woman who owned the name. An older human, solid and kind. She had been helping him look after Kerrol.
“Salamonda?” Kerrol surprised Evar with his concern.
“We must have lost her on the way,” Evar said. He felt guilty for not suggesting that they go back but there were at least five cratalacs in the tunnels. The woman was surely dead already or in no worse a position than the rest of them, albeit in a different tunnel.
“...ask him...” Clovis managed.
“Ask who what?”
“Arpix. About the weapon.”
Arpix spoke, closer to them than he had been. “It was mercury. That was all I had.”
“It poisons them that fast?” Evar knew from the education Starval had given him in such matters that mercury was a slow toxin that brought madness first, but only with long-term exposure.
“A catalyst,” Arpix said.
“A what?” Evar thought the human had the wrong word. It wasn’t one he’d heard before.
“Maybe I have the wrong word. It allows a reaction that would not otherwise occur. It doesn’t take part—”
“A poison to them.” Clovis cut across him, regaining a little strength.
“How did you get it?” Evar asked.
“The cliffs,” Arpix growled. “Exposed ore. Cinnabar. Not hard to extract.”
“And a librarian knew all this because...”
“Livira told me. She got it from a book.”
Evar said nothing. Even here. Even here Livira reached out for him. Perhaps she was watching now, a ghost at his shoulder.
The other humans were still whispering about Salamonda.
“Make them be quiet,” Evar said.
To his credit Arpix didn’t ask why. Silence fell.
“I don’t hear anything,” Kerrol hissed.
“Me neither.” Evar wondered why the cratalacs had stopped their screaming. Trying to lure them out to somewhere accessible, he guessed. “How long will they wait?”
“I don’t know,” Arpix said. “They’re solitary hunters normally. Large territories. One of those things needs a lot of food to keep it going, and there’s not much to eat out here.”
“I noticed.”
“So, by rights they’ll start fighting each other, then separate. Maybe one will stay. Claim the tunnels, hunt the surroundings. But how long it will take... I don’t know.”
“I’m going to check for Salamonda.”
“What?” Even Arpix sounded shocked.
“You are not.” Clovis found a grip on his arm and some measure of her old strength.
“Brother—”
“Say one more word, Kerrol, and I swear I will punch you in the mouth. I’m not having you mind-game me out of this.”
“Someone should,” Arpix said, his voice unsteady. “And I love Salamonda.”
“So does Livira.” Evar could feel her at his shoulder. Whether she was standing there as a ghost or not, she was with him. He had spent half his life in the book she wrote. Her kiss still tingled against his mouth. She wouldn’t stop him. She’d go with him. “I’ll be careful.”
“Those things hunt at night so they’re going to find you before you find them. And then they’ll shred you,” Arpix answered.
Evar had spent too long as a helpless witness, unable to intervene. “I can stick to the narrow ways they can’t fit in. Salamonda might be lost in the tight tunnels. Or lying somewhere, hurt.”
“You need me with you.” Arpix didn’t sound enthusiastic, but he did sound determined. “You don’t know the tunnels.”
“You can come,” Evar said. Though what Livira would think about him putting one friend in harm’s way in the hope of finding another, he couldn’t say. “Stay close.”
Arpix, also forced to crawl, elbowed past him. “You stay close. Grab my belt.”
Evar patted around and fastened a hand on the rope around Arpix’s narrow waist. “Done.” And they both started forward, in the direction they’d all come from.
“Bring that one back.” A curiously angry snarl from Clovis.
“She likes him,” Kerrol clarified from further back in the dark.
Clovis spat in outrage. “I meant my sword!”
—
The hunt for Salamonda started slow and ended fast. At first Arpix and Evar patted their way silently, blind in the tunnels, listening hard. Evar kept sniffing the air, hunting the cratalacs’ curious scent, a kind of dry rot that made him stretch his jaw in disgust.
They didn’t have to go far to hear the noise.
“What is it?” Evar couldn’t understand it. An arrhythmic banging and scuffing.
“Digging.”
“They’re digging us out?” Evar didn’t like the idea of that at all, but it would take a lot of effort, even with many cratalacs, since only one of them would be able to do useful work at any given time.
“Too far away,” Arpix growled. “Digging something else out, maybe.”
“The protection?” It hadn’t seemed that the skeer had exercised much control over their captives. The idea that they could locate and destroy whatever kept the skeer out hadn’t occurred to him.
“Or Salamonda.”
“She’s not calling for help...” Evar strained his ears.
“She wouldn’t,” Arpix said. “She wouldn’t want anyone coming after her. Two idiots like us, for example. She’d know they’d just get eaten.”
“Let’s see if we can get to her another way.” Evar started forward again, and Arpix, with a deep, trembling sigh, began to lead the way once more.
They’d covered another hundred yards or so before the screaming started. It began with the sound of earth and rocks falling. A ceiling collapse maybe, or a breakthrough. A cratalac scream followed, the first they’d heard since escaping the beasts. A cry like the earlier ones, full of rage and challenge. Then within moments the tunnels rang with multiple screams as if all five of the cratalacs to follow them into the dig were engaged in a furious battle. Evar couldn’t say how long it lasted. Moments or minutes. The sheer volume and fury of the screams undid him, turning his muscles to water and shaking his bones.
“It’s stopped?” Arpix’s question ventured into the silence that followed.
“I—” Evar stopped. He heard something new. A human’s voice?
“Salamonda!” And before Evar could react Arpix had pulled free and was running forward, presumably bent double.
“Arpix!” Evar gave chase, following the sound of retreating footsteps on his hands and knees.
At last a whisper of light from somewhere gave enough illumination for Evar to make out walls and tunnel roof. They’d left the safety of the smallest tunnels. Evar got to his feet and started to run with his head bowed, painfully aware that a cratalac could lunge from any of the dark openings he passed on either side. “Arpix! Come back!”
“Salamonda!” Arpix ran on, easy prey for the monsters.
Evar caught up with Arpix not far from the entrance they’d come in by. Enough light reached in to show the slumped bodies of at least two cratalacs. So many pieces of them were scattered around that it was hard to know whether there were three in total, or one in several large chunks.
“Arpix?” Salamonda’s voice, faint but not too distant.
“Stay!” Evar moved Arpix to the side and advanced with the white sword out before him, catching glimmers of daylight amid the gloom. Loose rock, dirt, and debris crunched under his feet, the spoils from digging done to enlarge the entrance to the side passage just ahead.
Evar turned the corner. More cratalacs lay butchered amid the piles of earth they’d dug out. Some sort of collapse had happened, enough to open a dusty crack in the ceiling through which daylight had jammed its bright fingers, not enough to explain in any way the amount of destruction visited upon the insectoids.
“Evar?” Salamonda’s voice emerged from the dust and gloom ahead.
Evar lifted his gaze from the carnage just in time to see something he didn’t understand. An animal of some kind, smaller than a human... but it looked as if it had just walked into the wall and vanished. “What... what was that?”
Arpix, who had not obeyed instructions, came to stand at his elbow. “A cat,” he said in a voice full of wonder. “I think it was a cat...”
Salamonda emerged, trembling and dusty, dirt in her hair. “He’s called Wentworth. He killed them all. I think Yute must have sent him to watch over me.”